domain:betonit.substack.com
doantkq
21hr ago
Last month, VDARE held its annual conference at the Samuel Taylor Suit Cottage, a beautiful castle constructed after the Civil War and recently purchased by the organization. VDARE is currently the subject of a lawsuit over its purchase of said castle.
For those unfamiliar, VDARE has been the leading anti-immigration outlet for the far right for roughly two decades. Historically, the website focused almost exclusively on immigration and "demographic replacement", with "race realism" and related topics (i.e., crime by African Americans) serving an ancillary function. This can be contrasted with Jared Taylor's American Renaissance, a publication more focused on American race issues. Unlike much of the far right, neither group takes an explicitly anti-Jewish stance, though VDARE has occasionally reposted or hosted antisemitic writers from Unz.
Given the growing influence of the alt-right/dissident right/whatever you want to call them into the conservative mainstream, I thought it might be helpful to summarise some of the speeches from the conference. This is taken from this article, which you can just read yourself.
An ever present personality at white nationalist adjacent events, Jared Taylor lamented the abolishment of confederate monuments:
our black secretary of defense ordered every trace of the Confederacy eradicated from federal land. We now know that President William McKinley and others of his generation who honored the valor and the sacrifice of Confederate soldiers were morally stunted. They didn’t have the exquisite ethical sensibilities of Lloyd Austin and Charles Schumer. . . . In our era there are many things that infuriate me, but of the most infuriating is the worms who don’t deserve to black the boots of a Confederate general prancing and howling and posing as their moral superiors.
Harrison Smith of Infowars, in appropriately conspiratorial fashion, said that policies of “infinite immigration forever” are meant to make opposition to technocratic power impossible. He suggested, for example, that one reason no one tries to impose “refugees” or antipollution measures on China — the world’s biggest polluter — is that the Chinese are already under effective control and threaten neither their own regime nor the ambitions of the World Economic Forum. The white population of the West, on the other hand, has “a heritage of resistance to tyranny,” which makes us the greatest threat to globalists’ plans. This is why they want “the destruction of whiteness,” where “whiteness” is defined as the European virtues of self-sufficiency, hard work, the nuclear family, and free expression.
Keith Woods, an antisemitic personality who has gained a large following on Twitter, also talked about the importance of immigration, pointing out that
immigration is “the queen of the battlefield,” meaning that if we lose on it, we lose on all other issues. There are people who disagree with us on immigration but who care about free speech and European traditions; they fail to understand that these things cannot be preserved unless we stop mass immigration.
James Kirkpatrick summarised the tenor of the conference best in his remarks:
One of the reasons we are so angry at what is being done to our country is that we see our patriotism — a kind of faith in our nation as something greater than the sum of its parts — being squandered and exploited. Cynics and sociopaths are rewarded, while those who have kept the faith are the first to be betrayed. If this keeps up, faith dies. Enormous sacrifices have been made for America and the other nations of the West, and people are now forced to ask what it was all for. The soldiers of World War II would never have laid down their lives for multiculturalism, but that is what they got.
A common enemy, however, may be an even stronger political advantage than a common faith. Democrats have a useful common enemy: white people. Republicans lose because they pretend not to have any enemies.
The current split on the Left about Israel is over the question of whether Israelis are white: both sides are our opponents. Republicans hoping to make political hay by denouncing anti-Semitism are wasting their time. We don’t need to take sides in this internal leftist fight, but to take our side, something no Republican seems able to understand.
Immigration is the issue that can unite us. Claims that immigration is good for us or for the economy quickly collapse, and yield to admissions that, yes, it is bad for us, but that is good because we deserve to be punished. Meanwhile, 45 percent of Hispanics and 42 percent of Democrats support mass deportation. It takes tremendous Republican stupidity to fail to take advantage of this changing mood.
Mr. Hood asked: What matters more than nationality and citizenship — what matters when you are trying to get into a school, get a job, when you are confronted on the street? Race. This is certainly what our rulers believe. Politics is largely biological, and biology is our human hardware; religion and ideology are software. Law and institutions are passed down as the patrimony of a specific people, and work only for that people.
When Americans see Mexican demonstrators cursing them, waving Mexican flags, and celebrating the end of white America, it no longer matters what Republicans wants them to think. They see that the real issue is us vs. them. The visceral sense of identity they are forced to feel will rally our people for the struggle.
I recently heard of yaslighting, which is where instead of convincing someone their true beliefs are delusional, you affirm their delusional beliefs and convince them they're true.
Seems to apply to a lot of things (especially transgenderism) but what I have in mind is college degree choice. Plenty of female-oriented degrees such as psychology, behavioral science, speech pathology, etc. require a Masters in order to really start working in the field. Seemingly, most of the people who study those majors just aren't aware of this.
I'm unsure whether these women just haven't googled the most basic facts of the career they'll spend their next 4-6 years pursuing, or whether they're semi-deliberately deluding themselves. My guess is the latter. If you're going to college to get married, you need to look like you have your own ambitions. Pursuing a highly-educated mate just isn't a respectable goal for women anymore.
My mother is one of these women. The way she describes it, she finished her Psychology bachelors and only then realized it would take another couple years to make a career out of it. She's extremely smart, conscientious, and logical. I can't imagine her as someone who would just forget to look into these things. During that time she married a man who would go on to become very successful, and I think that (marrying a good man, that is, not necessarily a rich one) must have been the ultimate goal all along, whatever she told herself in the process.
I'm starting to see a similar phenomenon among my siblings. My brothers have laid out step-by-step plans for college and their eventual careers. My sister just wants to study Psychology because it's interesting. None of them would breathe a word about the different expectations between the genders--the topic is somewhat taboo--but they nevertheless have Gotten the Message and are all pursuing seemingly effective strategies optimized for their gender.
My wife and I have broached the subject of Psychology careers a couple of times with my sister, and she seems actively disinterested in thinking it through. I expect she, like my mother, will get married sometime during or just after her Bachelor's degree, and claim she was unaware she needed a Master's to turn the major into a career.
This is all well and good. I find myself continually amazed at how good normies are at unconsciously separating reality from social reality and smoothly living by them both without acknowledging the contradictions. The problem arises when someone doesn't get the message and thinks the social reality is the reality, that men can "study what you enjoy" for 4 years in college with no lasting impact to career prospects or marriagability, or that women can do the same without searching for husbands and things will work out for them.
My wife is a teacher. Most of her coworkers fall into these categories. Some are men who pursued useless degrees and now work as aides. Others (the school's speech pathologists, behavioral interventionists, psychologists, etc.) are women who didn't end up getting married during their Bachelor's, and now are working very slowly towards Master's degrees while working.
American culture gets a lot of things wrong, but imo nothing so badly as gender roles. We encourage women to overeducate, in the process aging themselves out of the possibility of having children, and depriving the next generation of those who could have been their smartest and most capable mothers. It is seen as empowering and feminist to socially pressure women into denying one of the most natural human impulses, that of having and raising children, so that they can get more educated and make more money.
Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.
Telling women to not look for husbands in college, and focus on education, is similar, though its results manifest in different ways. Such women will (as they get more educated) grow increasingly unable to find comparably "impressive" partners. Many will remain single, sleeping around but never committing, while a few will "settle" many years down the road. Neither situation is great for raising a family.
Sometimes the people in the middle are hardest hurt--those who haven't bought into the modern secular ideology or the trad religious one. Women who don't go all-in on their careers, but also don't actively seek out husbands in college, and so end up in dead-end jobs with whatever mediocre husband they end up with.
American tfr fell to 1.62 in 2023, its lowest rate ever, and is even lower among our most intelligent and conscientious. Financial incentives meant to correct this in places like Finland and Turkey have accomplished very little overall. The problem is not financial, it is cultural and legal. People need to think of advice like "study your hobby and things will work out" as a malicious lie meant to signal a luxury belief. Motherhood needs to be far more prestigious than any career. Couples need to be allowed to mutually agree to contracts incentivizing them to stick together.
The truth is and always has been the truth, but more people need to be made more consciously aware of it. If women want large families, they need to start before finishing their Master's. I burned a lot of credibility with my immediate family getting married as young as I did, and sacrificing my social life and physical health to be financially ready for children quickly. This was the right decision, but it pains me to say I probably won't be able to convince them to do the same until after the crucial window has passed. I hope to convince you, though, or if you are already convinced, to offer you some ammunition convincing those you care about.
For the vast majority of people, the quality and quantity of their children will have far more of an effect on the future than anything else they could do. If you like being alive, and/or find it meaningful, it is likely your kids will too, and bringing them into the world to experience the joy of existence is an enormous gift you have the power to offer them. Less important, but still significant, 71% of Americans are happy with their decision to have children, or wish they had more, while only 10% wish they had less.
Whether for selfish or selfless reasons, having children early is the right call for most people, but our culture has conducted an enormous yaslighting campaign to prevent this from happening until it's too late.
Taste is just an engineering problem, though. We understand enough about how cells grow and divide to intervene in the process, and understand the chemicals that cause things to taste like so pretty well. I think you could get lab grown meat that's reasonably indistinguishable in taste from (average store bought, with implied caveats about taste and nutrition) real meat right now if you were willing to pay absurd prices (edit: like, tens of thousands of dollars per pound).
OliveTapenade
16hr ago
This reads like just reposting a news or summary article.
Do you have an original comment or thought, or question to ask?
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
20hr ago
That's a cool castle, the crenellations echo the traditional design elements of medieval European castles, yet the building's relatively small scale and the integration of modern features such as large windows betray it's a modern reinterpretation rather than a historical fortification.
I thought it was interesting enough to repost and thought it would prompt a discussion. This forum is unique in that it has white nationalist fascists alongside liberals so responses are fascinating.
As for me, I have very little sympathy for the far right, but that doesn't mean I don't find what they say worth discussing.
For example, while immigration is a big issue in mainstream media, it is never discussed from a far right perspective. Take Elon Musk: he recently took on the Great Replacement Theory and came out recently in favor of basically unlimited immigration to combat plummeting birth rates. Musk is ostensibly painted as a right wing figure and here he is advocating for the effective destruction of ethnic Europeans. What the far right says to about thr Great Replacement Theory is very different, namely that it is no "theory" at all: replacing ethnic European majorities in order to mitigate identitarianism has been the stated policy of Western governments for 60 years now. If you want sound bites or quotes or documents, those can all be pulled out easily but that's like taking about the theory of free trade; we're not talking about abstracts notions, this is literally stated policy. Bill Clinton famously stated in 1996 to applause that by 2050 there will be no ethnic majority in the United States. In the case of Europe, part of the entire anti-fascist social engineering project is to eradicate European identity and nationalist sentiments.
More to the point, a nation is not an economy and its people are not staff members. Our leaders should not think "there's too few people in this country, they should be replaced". Oncollapsing birth rates in Asia, places like Japan are massively overpopulated. Why does Japan need 150 million people on an island the size of California? Why does the US need 300 million people? Why does England need millions more people on its tiny landmass? Is it necessary to destroy the ethnic makeup of these countries to ensure the line always goes up? The move away from tertiary economies means that we don't need the same amount of people we did in 1950.
This is all a bit like saying, "my kids are moving out of the house, I should find other people to move in and pretend to be my kids".The point that Musk so blantatly misses is that the people - the kids - are my race, my ethnos. They are part of a chain that spans thousands of years and wanting us to perpetuate is natural and right.
The only legitimate purpose of the state is to guarantee the posterity of the people that constitute that state: the English, the German, the Polish. Nothing else is truly legitimate, or if you prefer, as important. The purpose of the state is not to replace its people to guarantee pensions. That's akin to a fire department burning down houses.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
16hr ago
I went to the trouble of writing an effort post somewhere that was read by like 8 people, so I'll just reproduce the primary bit, and tack on additional commentary at the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotherapy
Large-scale international reviews of scientific studies have concluded that psychotherapy is effective for numerous conditions.[8][22]
One line of research consistently finds that supposedly different forms of psychotherapy show similar effectiveness. According to The Handbook of Counseling Psychology: "Meta-analyses of psychotherapy studies have consistently demonstrated that there are no substantial differences in outcomes among treatments". The handbook states that there is "little evidence to suggest that any one psychological therapy consistently outperforms any other for any specific psychological disorders. This is sometimes called the Dodo bird verdict after a scene/section in Alice in Wonderland where every competitor in a race was called a winner and is given prizes".[151]
Further analyses seek to identify the factors that the psychotherapies have in common that seem to account for this, known as common factors theory; for example the quality of the therapeutic relationship, interpretation of problem, and the confrontation of painful emotions.[152][153][page needed][154][155]
Outcome studies have been critiqued for being too removed from real-world practice in that they use carefully selected therapists who have been extensively trained and monitored, and patients who may be non-representative of typical patients by virtue of strict inclusionary/exclusionary criteria. Such concerns impact the replication of research results and the ability to generalize from them to practicing therapists.[153][156]
However, specific therapies have been tested for use with specific disorders,[157] and regulatory organizations in both the UK and US make recommendations for different conditions.[158][159][160]
The Helsinki Psychotherapy Study was one of several large long-term clinical trials of psychotherapies that have taken place. Anxious and depressed patients in two short-term therapies (solution-focused and brief psychodynamic) improved faster, but five years long-term psychotherapy and psychoanalysis gave greater benefits. Several patient and therapist factors appear to predict suitability for different psychotherapies.[161]
Meta-analyses have established that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and psychodynamic psychotherapy are equally effective in treating depression.[162]
The bolded section is the one I can't easily verify, at least not when it's 9 am and I've been up all night studying.
Specifically regarding CBT, I found the following metanalysis-
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23870719/
Results: A total of 115 studies met inclusion criteria. The mean effect size (ES) of 94 comparisons from 75 studies of CBT and control groups was Hedges g = 0.71 (95% CI 0.62 to 0.79), which corresponds with a number needed to treat of 2.6. However, this may be an overestimation of the true ES as we found strong indications for publication bias (ES after adjustment for bias was g = 0.53), and because the ES of higher-quality studies was significantly lower (g = 0.53) than for lower-quality studies (g = 0.90). The difference between high- and low-quality studies remained significant after adjustment for other study characteristics in a multivariate meta-regression analysis. We did not find any indication that CBT was more or less effective than other psychotherapies or pharmacotherapy. Combined treatment was significantly more effective than pharmacotherapy alone (g = 0.49).
Conclusions: There is no doubt that CBT is an effective treatment for adult depression, although the effects may have been overestimated until now. CBT is also the most studied psychotherapy for depression, and thus has the greatest weight of evidence. However, other treatments approach its overall efficacy.
And when speaking of CBT as applied to more psychiatric conditions:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/
We identified 269 meta-analytic studies and reviewed of those a representative sample of 106 meta-analyses examining CBT for the following problems: substance use disorder, schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, depression and dysthymia, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, eating disorders, insomnia, personality disorders, anger and aggression, criminal behaviors, general stress, distress due to general medical conditions, chronic pain and fatigue, distress related to pregnancy complications and female hormonal conditions. Additional meta-analytic reviews examined the efficacy of CBT for various problems in children and elderly adults. The strongest support exists for CBT of anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, bulimia, anger control problems, and general stress. Eleven studies compared response rates between CBT and other treatments or control conditions. CBT showed higher response rates than the comparison conditions in 7 of these reviews and only one review reported that CBT had lower response rates than comparison treatments. In general, the evidence-base of CBT is very strong. However, additional research is needed to examine the efficacy of CBT for randomized-controlled studies. Moreover, except for children and elderly populations, no meta-analytic studies of CBT have been reported on specific subgroups, such as ethnic minorities and low income samples.
Addressing the specific claims of similar efficacy to the forms of therapy based on pseudoscientific principles:
CBT for depression was more effective than control conditions such as waiting list or no treatment, with a medium effect size (van Straten, Geraedts, Verdonck-de Leeuw, Andersson, & Cuijpers, 2010; Beltman, Oude Voshaar, & Speckens, 2010). However, studies that compared CBT to other active treatments, such as psychodynamic treatment, problem-solving therapy, and interpersonal psychotherapy, found mixed results. Specifically, meta-analyses found CBT to be equally effective in comparison to other psychological treatments (e.g., Beltman, Oude Voshaar, & Speckens, 2010; Cuijpers, Smit, Bohlmeijer, Hollon, & Andersson, 2010; Pfeiffer, Heisler, Piette, Rogers, & Valenstein, 2011). Other studies, however, found favorable results for CBT (e.g. Di Giulio, 2010; Jorm, Morgan, & Hetrick, 2008; Tolin, 2010). For example, Jorm and colleagues (2008) found CBT to be superior to relaxation techniques at post-treatment. Additionally, Tolin (2010) showed CBT to be superior to psychodynamic therapy at both post-treatment and at six months follow-up, although this occurred when depression and anxiety symptoms were examined together.
Compared to pharmacological approaches, CBT and medication treatments had similar effects on chronic depressive symptoms, with effect sizes in the medium-large range (Vos, Haby, Barendregt, Kruijshaar, Corry, & Andrews, 2004). Other studies indicated that pharmacotherapy could be a useful addition to CBT; specifically, combination therapy of CBT with pharmacotherapy was more effective in comparison to CBT alone (Chan, 2006).
In the particular case of BPD, after talking to @Throwaway05 I looked into the actual benefit of DBT, and was surprised to see that it was genuinely far more effective than I expected. Somewhere around the ballpark of 50% success rates in curbing symptoms and letting quite a few of them lead entirely unremarkable and functional lives. If 50% sounds underwhelming, wait till you hear the typical cure rates I'm used to.
So:
Is therapy and therapy speak actually harmful to people that have mental illness?
A clear no. The evidence base is nigh unimpeachable, even if, as discussed above, the most bullshit insanity inducing forms like Freudian or Lacanian psychotherapy still beat placebo.
My personal working hypothesis is that therapy acts as a decent substitute for a friend, a non-judgemental and understanding one who has seemingly endless time to listen to your problems, and is forbidden, on the pain of losing the way they make a living, from disclosing your troubles. Unfortunately, quite a few people genuinely lack actual good friends, so even such as ersatz substitute has notable effects.
This is an entirely different question from the fad we've been having for quite a few years of "therapy culture", or the insistence of people to co-opt/misuse therapy speak to lend their bullshit legitimacy. Then again, there are practising Freudian and Lacanian therapists, and few other people seem to have the same burning urge I have to burn their houses down. Even then, I must concede they beat placebo, as well as the dead horse that is repressed penis envy.
Anyway, therapy seems to beat placebo, and works synergistically with drugs, even if you cynically notice that therapy based off nonsense does much the same thing as more considered approaches, but it's not in dispute that it works. At least I have the consolation of being able to throw drugs at people instead of just talking at them as a licensed shrink in training, for all the quibbling about if SSRIs work, ain't nobody claiming their ADHD isn't being helped when they're zooted up on stimulants.
To conclude, is therapy helpful when administered by someone who knows what the fuck they're doing? Yes.
Are they/us responsible for random idiots using it as an obfuscation technique? Not really, though the upper echelons of HR are often staffed by people with degrees in psychology where I'm at.
Is it possibly a net negative for the set of {all people subjected to mealy mouthed terminology}? No clue, but you asked about the actually mentally ill, and you have my answer. No surprise that a few of them pick up on the lingo.
To_Mandalay
3hr ago
To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards. Motherhood and femininity in general have been devalued for as long as patriarchy has existed, so pretty much the whole of human history. I can't think of any human cultures, let alone any of the big-name European and near-eastern ones that the modern west is descended from, which have not considered the female sphere and female pursuits to be intrinsically lesser than that of men.* The "oh, women aren't inferior to men, they just have different strengths/they're made for different roles" line you hear from conservatives nowadays (what Christians call 'complementarianism') is itself an anti-modernist rearguard action. For the great majority of the history of western civilization, philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals, whether Pagan, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or atheist, have been happy to state that actually, women are just strictly inferior to men. It's the reason you occasionally get figures like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great who are praised for being essentially men in women's bodies, but you never get men praised for being essentially women in men's bodies.
What happened in more resent centuries isn't that motherhood and womanhood were devalued. Motherhood and womanhood were devalued way back in the primordial past, and only recently have women been allowed to escape such devalued roles at scale.
You can't make motherhood 'prestigious' because motherhood has never been prestigious. Closest thing would just be banning women from doing actually prestigious things.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
Some are men who pursued useless degrees and now work as aids.
Now that's an interesting career choice! How much does it pay?
Spookykou
5hr ago
One wrinkle for me when trying to think about the efficacy of therapy is that the incidence of mental illness has skyrocketed in step with the wide spread adoption of therapy culture. This is supposed to be caused by increased awareness, but then you have things like Scott's Anorexia in South Korea story, that push me towards a different theory. Therapy culture is horrible, and therapy itself is mostly trash (which is why we can't make any meaningful improvements to the practice after over a hundred years), it only works in as much as it is the socially acceptably path to resolve such issues. I imagine if we could check, running amok would have been found to be an effective above placebo 'therapy' as well. Outside of a handful of mental illnesses with consistent cross cultural manifestations, everything else is either conversion disorder with people trying to fit their negative emotional states into a culturally understood framework, or increasingly, excuses for shitty behavior and to avoid accountability. The framework spawned by therapy culture in the west is particularly bad, mental health awareness is bad, stoicism is probably correct.
HighResolutionSleep
23hr ago
She's a 10, there's absolutely nothing wrong with her, you managed to bring her home with you, and she's a little tipsy. But you just noticed that on your bookshelf behind her there's an exposed and visible hardcover copy of Ted Cruz's Unwoke. What do you do?
Tenaz
2hr ago
I think $14/hr. Tbf though these guys aren't the brightest and I'm not sure I'd even describe it as a career "choice." Like leaves, they were blown around by the winds of culture until they happened to end up as aides.
incidence of mental illness has skyrocketed in step with the wide spread adoption of therapy culture
That is hopelessly confounded. For most of history, the only treatment for mental illnesses was beatings, blood letting, the asylum, or maybe some mercury if it was syphilitic.
They barely had the conceptual framework to understand mental illness in the first place.
Besides, we know that the stressors of modernity are bad for mental health in of themselves, just look at social media and dating apps for recent examples. Atomization of families, loss of the (false) comfort from religion and so on.
Not everything is a mass psychogenic illness. I would bet a great deal of money that things like depression, BPD, bipolar disorder and the like aren't. And therapy helps, at least when we now recognize and formally diagnose those who could need it.
My own ADHD would certainly have gone undiagnosed, as would so many other conditions (not that therapy does anything there, the drugs help).
therapy itself is mostly trash (which is why we can't make any meaningful improvements to the practice after over a hundred years), it only works in as much as it is the socially acceptably path to resolve such issues. I imagine if we could check, running amok would have been found to be an effective above placebo 'therapy' as well
I feel like my citations speak for themselves here. Is it a good thing that we have the option of paying money to talk to someone in private instead of running about with a machete? I'd be curious to hear how that's not the case.
I'm not defending therapy culture. It's infantilizing to say the least. But actual therapy works well enough that we often consider it the firstline treatment before resorting to the funny drugs. And that's a considered decision made by multiple independent bodies, on the basis of a great deal of evidence.
cjet79
11hr ago
It's an engineering problem, but the precision control needed is pretty high. I don't think it's impossible, just difficult and thus likely to remain expensive.
Human tongues are pretty sensitive, they can pick up very tiny differences in texture and taste. Consider diet sodas. If you've ever had a regular soda and a diet soda you can usually notice a slight difference between the two. They try to make the two sodas taste the same and fail, even though it's a much easier problem than textured meat.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
11hr ago
I think you could get lab grown meat that's reasonably indistinguishable in taste from (average store bought, with implied caveats about taste and nutrition) real meat right now if you were willing to pay absurd prices.
You can't, though. And when the bills to ban real meat come around, they will be based on this false assumption, which will be trumpeted through all the normal propaganda outlets (media, schools and universities, political pressure groups with sciency names, etc).
(And further, there's better meat than the average store-bought easily available for a modest premium, often in the same stores)
Therapyspeak is the language of the Anarchist. It is the language of those who do not believe in discipline and self control, who want to erase the line between good and evil.
Some of the terms I've heard quite a bit in the past 5 years that I highly distrust:
"Toxic". People and relationships are declared to be toxic, and it is understood that bad actions can then be taken against them. There is no standard for what makes something toxic. Rhetoric using this term often recommends the user to end relationships, and it generally does not look like sound wise advice. Using this term is a request for power and authority, rather than an assertion of meaning.
"Self Care". This is a synonym for self-indulgence, but with a good connotation instead of a bad one. Spending 8 hours watching netflix for example, in my grandfather's English, would be understood to be a moderately shameful act of vice. Now it can be referred to as "Self Care", in which case it is understood as a noble recognition of ones own weakness.
"Triggered". This word is used to blame others for ones own mental outbursts. A man who has internalized a value system of discipline and personal responsibility would never use such a word, but a member of the CPUSA would never question one who did.
"Codependency". Means nothing more than "relationship", but again, it goes from having what is, according to my values, a correct positive connotation, to having an incorrect negative connotation.
There are values which lead to a good stable society. These values were baked into the our culture, into our stories, into our language itself. Most respectable men have internalized these values- its quite hard to achieve anything in life without doing so.
When people use therapyspeak, they are signaling their opposition to these values. They may truly oppose them, or they may want to signify membership in the group of people who oppose them. But if you are still committed to those values, for whatever reason, you may find such speech uncomfortable.
One thing I have no explanation for, is why all of these terms seem to have originated in therapy. I cannot think of any other recently popularized terms like this- terms designed to assault traditional European values and signal membership in the revolution- which did not originate in therapy.
gattsuru
22hr ago
Any ideas for small electrical things that you use regularly that would make a good Project?
I've been running some students through designing a macropad variant, and someone in the tumblr rat-adj-adj sphere is building a small timer. But a lot of the field, including things I've run as student projects before, tend to be toys.
I like your basic two-wheel robot as much as the next person, but it's something that at best you make, put on the shelf, and never touch again. Same for infinity mirrors, and the best that can be said for epaper weather stations is that at least they'll change on the shelf. Or, alternatively, there's a ton of projects to build something that's really useful for somebody who wants to be an electrical engineer and needs something that'll work until they can buy a Real Tool.
Ideally, I'd have students long enough to see what they'd want, but I've gotten a lot of shrugs, or worse questions for stuff that seems deceptively easy (forget the ethics of DIY AppleTags, the TI MSP430 library for LoRA suuuuuuucks). And in more cases, I don't really have the timelines for it, as hilariously enough even if we're getting circuit boards done as students finish the CAD, I need to have the non-jellybean parts ordered months in advance or they'll get in slower than OSHPark or JLCPCB can turn something around.
MartianNight
6hr ago
I'm just trying to pin down the argument here. If the argument is “the government should ban unhealthy foods in the interest of public health” that's a position that's easy to understand, whether you agree with it or not, but adopting it would imply banning a bunch of traditional foods too.
If the argument is “the government should ban unhealthy foods, but only if they are new” then the logic is less clear: why does it matter if an unhealthy food is new or not? You should be able to defend the “only if they are new” qualifier, unless your real motivation is something different (e.g. irrational hatred of lab-grown meats or the people who advocate for them).
(Note that all of this assumes that lab grown meat is unhealthy as a given, which I certainly don't believe in the strict sense, though I will concede there is some unknown risk associated with it.)
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10hr ago
Funny, dude. We see what you're doing. At least don't use ChatGPT.
SerialStateLineXer
10hr ago
From what I have seen, they don't claim that the company is necessarily racist but instead they advocate expanding our recruitment to things like HBCUs or removing degree requirements for jobs.
curious_straight_ca
11hr ago
What do you mean "you can't, though"? I am really quite confident that I could get lab-grown meat that passed a blind test for something like tens of thousands of dollars per pound if I for whatever reason really wanted to. It's not that difficult of an engineering problem, we know how to create the relevant tastes and textures, the problem is getting costs down to what nature's gotten very good at over a billion years.
curious_straight_ca
14hr ago
The way you say it you'd think Critical Theory was an esoteric subversive cult and not a very popular and influential historical school of thought, whose notable figures rank among the most cited individuals in all of published research everywhere.
functor
15hr ago
The jewish problem is that they want their country to be an ethnostate that steals land and ethnically cleanses neighbors while promoting multiculturalism everywhere else. White countries can't be white since then jews would be uncomfortable. This has been a cornerstone of the reasons why jews have not been liked. They often work against group interests of other peoples while pushing their own group interest to an extreme extent.
The left will have trouble reconciling the radical individualism they have been inculcated with and extreme jewish ethnocentrism. The right will be sceptical of jews because ADL wants them banned of twitter and Ben Gvir wants millions of Palestinians to become refugees 300 km from EU.
The left will be shocked at how they are treated in a diametrically different way than when they protested against white men sitting with their legs too far apart. However, jews are a small minority and won't be able to control all the goyim in the long run.
Is therapy and therapy speak actually harmful to people that have mental illness? As a programmer, I have ended up in multiple projects with people that have BPD or bipolar disorder because it seems to attract these kinds of people.
The first time I noticed this was when I was in college and a good friend of mine who is bipolar asked me to be his partner on a final project together for an operating systems class to use Markov chains for predictive paging. We had it almost done and I had generated a bunch of data to use and my algorithm was slightly off. He took the data and code I sent him that I hadn't yet submitted to our GitHub and took it as his own and just submitted it so it looked like I didn't do anything. When I confronted him about it, he started using a bunch of therapy speak like I understand you think this is what happened etc. and all this other bullshit that he learned from therapists. The thing was that it obviously wasn't true what he was saying but he had all these tools from a therapist to disregard me being annoyed about what actually happened (and I had literal proof). It turned out he had taken a bunch of adderal that made him borderline insane and used that therapy speak to deny reality. He eventually apologized to me and just said he was stressed and took too much adderal and it made him insane for a few weeks before he graduated. This is not the first time I have seen this.
I have also seen this in my family where my grandpa sexually molested his daughter (my dad's sister). When my grandpa died, she started accusing my dad of bizarre stuff like sniffing and stealing her panties. The thing is, this is literally impossible because my dad is 10 years younger than her so he would have been a toddler when this sexual molestation she claimed my dad did happened. Plus she was in college and away for some of this stuff that she claimed happened. Yet her therapist encouraged her to accuse my dad of this publicly and ruin his reputation in our family. Other than her kids, everyone realized it was literally impossible, but half of our family don't talk now because a therapist encouraged her to make insane claims. I'm not some right wing extremist saying don't believe women, but the idea that a 5 year old was sexually harassing a 15 year old is literally insane. Yet she found a therapist that told her this is true. This clearly isn't a scientific field.
I currently work at a big company that is woke as hell (possibly top 10% woke) and because I am an executive director and have admin privileges, I get involved in similar disputes with our legal and HR team. I don't read these people's emails and chats, but from talking to our HR and legal team when I have to pull this data there are so many insane people making these claims of sexual harassment or bigotry.
The funniest part is despite how absurdly woke this company is and all the identity politics groups we have, almost none of them claim the company is discriminating against them. My executive admin is a young Black woman who runs the Black company group. From what I have seen, they don't claim that the company is necessarily racist but instead they advocate expanding our recruitment to things like HBCUs or removing degree requirements for jobs. I'm sure they deep down want quotas and they massively get supported by management, but I haven't seen any explicit calls for this.
This brings me back to therapy speak. All these people that have sued our company for "discrimination" have used bullshit therapy speak to justify their insane claims. This company bends over backwards to hire blacks and hispanics (and by the way, there are a lot of hispanics in the company regardless they don't need affirmative action) and anything claimed otherwise is nonsense. Therapy speak justifies people who are bad at their job and allows them to think they are victims. And all the woke women and blacks in HR have agreed with this! Bottom line, a lot of people are being enabled by therapists to be toxic and blame whites or patriarchy instead of their own behavior, and even the woke HR people agree with this. Sorry for the rant.
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